Author Jeffrey Scott, MBA, is an NALP consultant member and author, business coach, hall-of-fame consultant, and expert in growth and profit maximization in the lawn & landscape industry.
Do you ever feel so crazy busy, that you end up skipping or dropping your internal meetings in order to just focus on the work at hand?
All the best companies are good at making strategic plans over the winter, but when the spring rush hits (and punches them in the face, as Mike Tyson would say), some of them fall back into reactive mode.
They end up canceling team meetings, pushing their people to work faster and harder (not necessarily smarter) and revert back to outmoded methods and systems.
This is a missed opportunity.
Getting punched in the face by spring is inevitable, but how you respond is not.
You can stop the spring chaos, and greatly increase your productivity, by making better use of your daily and weekly huddles.
Daily Huddle: This is a short, stand-up meeting that keeps each person accountable to his or her role and results. In the huddle your people report on the one or two key metrics they are responsible for each day. The huddle is a place where people can ask for help solving problems. It is a time to remind everyone to keep in his or her lanes, and reinforce the “we” feeling.
My clients (who have brought the discipline to implement these consistently) tell me that it saves them time, greatly improves communication, and creates a disciplined work environment.
Weekly Huddle: This is a roll-up of the daily huddle; it is good for reflecting on the week past, and the upcoming week. It is a sit down meeting, where you can brainstorm and solve bigger problems, review KPIs in more depth, and focus on hiring, personnel and other strategic issues that need to be managed.
Keys to implementation:
– Hold them at the same time each day or week
– Ensure everyone in the company is in a huddle, and has a key metric to report on each day
– Finish on time, but make sure problems don’t get swept under the rug
These huddles don’t cost you time, rather they save you time. The reason your company reverts to old habits and standards in the spring, and falls off course to your strategic plans, is because the leaders are not holding the reigns and pulling the teams back together daily and weekly.
Use your huddles to align the team, and to continue to build the business, fine tune systems, and ensure everyone is meeting their KPIs. If you stopped doing huddles, now is the time to start them back up again.
What you doing to keep your people organized, productive and on target?
